Prank Call

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Don't go makin' phony calls
 Please stick to the seven-digit numbers you're used to
 I know that you think it's funny drivin' folks up the wall
 But it's really gettin' old fast

—"Weird Al" Yankovic, "Phony Calls"

A Prank Call is a telephone call made in order to make somebody look foolish.

This is a common staple in many comedy situations, though less often thanks to the introduction of a system such as caller ID. Yet, many professionals have adapted workarounds, such as hiding their numbers with phony covers. Sometimes, the usage of Punny Names have often comes into play. In real life, it can depend on the location when it comes to legality, with fines being the most common punishments.

A subversion of this is known as Mistaken for Prank Call, where a call sounds like a prank, only to be found that it wasn't.

The Other Wiki has a page about this topic that goes into more detail than we do.

Not to be confused with Phoney Call.

Examples of Prank Call include:

Fan Works

Film

  • In the 1978 horror film Halloween, a group of friends tease one another with prank calls as a Halloween trick. During one such prank, Lynda is strangled by Michael Myers while in the midst of a phone call with Laurie. Laurie, assuming it is another friend making a prank call, hangs up on Lynda's cries of distress.

Literature

Live-Action TV

  • Steve Allen was a pioneer in the use of this, on his 1960s variety show.
  • Fonejacker, a 2007 show airing on the British E4 channel, features prank calls made by star Kayvan Novak to members of the general public; recordings of the calls are aired with cut-and-paste animations (similar to Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus) representing the speakers taking part.
  • The teaser for a Cheers episode had Woody not falling for a prank call, even though the caller (revealed to be Frasier) tries to explain it to him... and vice versa.
  • On Freaks and Geeks, because Bill had a history of being Picked Last, he prank called his gym teacher out of frustration and anger.
  • One of the most famous practitioners in the United Kingdom is impressionist Jon Culshaw, mostly but not exclusively on Dead Ringers, He once rang up then Prime Minister Tony Blair live on air and pretended to be William Hague, who was then leader of the opposition. The prime minister spotted it pretty quickly. Culshaw is also famous for his scarily accurate impression of the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who. He's used this several times, including in prank calls to Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh Doctor), Colin Baker (the Sixth Doctor), Peter Davison (the Fifth Doctor) and... Tom Baker, who actually played the Fourth Doctor:

John Culshaw: "Hello, this is The Doctor."
 Tom Baker: "What, oh no, no you must be mistaken, I am The Doctor."

Music

  • "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1996 parody of TLC's "Waterfalls", "Phony Calls", is not only all about this trope, it incorporates a snippet of one of Bart's phone calls from The Simpsons.
  • blink-182's song "What's My Age Again?" includes a prank call which is defeated by Caller ID.
  • One of the signature devices of the Irish comedy hip-hop group Rubberbandits.

Puppet Shows

  • Crank Yankers was a Comedy Central TV show which featured puppets re-enacting both sides of genuine prank calls made by the production staff. The performers would do the crank calls, and then a set of puppeteers wielding Hensonesque caricatures of both parties would act out the scene with extra visual gags. One of the best was rapper Ludacris calling up his manager, claiming he wanted to change his name to "Mr. Peanut". On Luda's end, his puppet was trying on monocles and top hats, while his manager's puppet was calmly shredding Ludacris' contract, and pressing a Big Red Button marked "In Case of Insane Rapper".

Radio

  • Sal Governale and Richard Christy, writers for and on-air personalities on The Howard Stern Show, have made numerous prank calls for the show, calling up public-access TV shows, other radio programs and just random people. They have also pranked celebrities with a fictional radio program they "host" called the "Jack and Rod Show". Unsurprisingly, Howard Stern participates in their pranks.
  • See the "Roy D. Mercer" calls in Recorded and Stand Up Comedy, below.
  • Most "Morning Zoo" radio shows, copying Howard Stern as they do, will do this at some point.
    • The radio station PLJ in New York City actually calls it "Phone Scams".
    • 93.3 FLZ's MJ Morning show really likes really annoying crank calls.
    • This Morning Zoo prank call went very very wrong.
  • Spanish-language radio show El vacilón de la mañana was famous in the Hispanic world for creating the infamous "Manolo Cabeza de Huevo" (Egghead Manolo) prank. It all begins with the DJ calling a concierge who hates being called "egghead". He promptly calls him and tells him "egghead". Then the DJ calls him and, with a high screeching voice, claims to be his bunhole. The final result: Manolo ends up yelling "Fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck you all, and fuck all your motherfucking genealogic tree!".
    • Said radio show also managed to successfully trick Hugo Chávez into thinking he was being called by Fidel Castro, and vice versa.
  • In Quebec, the most well known phone pranksters were the Justiciers Masqués, a team of radio hosts. They usually prank normal people from around Quebec, but they also successfully pranked many Canadian politicians, and even Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France, by passing as Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They also fooled Britney Spears into thinking she was speaking to Celine Dion... despite them being an all men team and having French as their first language.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

  • The Jerky Boys were Johnny Brennan and Kamal Ahmed, a 1989-2000 comedy act from Queens, NY whose primary claim to fame was recordings of prank phone calls made either to unsuspecting recipients or inflicted on callers responding to classified ads placed in New York City-area newspapers. The victims of their pranks were usually subjected to over-the-top character voices and bizarre situations. The Jerky Boys initially circulated "bootleg" tapes of their pranks, which brought them to the attention of radio personality Howard Stern; Stern took a liking to their comedy and gave them national exposure, which led to a record deal; their first release was in 1993, and as of 2021 they've sold more than eight million copies of their various albums -- virtually all of which were prank phone calls.
  • Comedian Tom Mabe became known for recordings of his prank responses to unsolicited telemarketing calls. One of his most famous calls involved convincing a telemarketer that he had inadvertently called the scene of a homicide.
    • Mabe is also known for attending an event at which telemarketers gathered in Washington D.C. with the hopes of discouraging new laws that would prevent telemarketing. Mabe booked a room in the same hotel in which they were staying and called the telemarketers in their rooms at 3 a.m. to pretend to sell them sleeping pills.
  • "Leroy Mercer" was a character created and voiced by John R. Bean, a Knoxville, TN resident in the early 1980s. As "Mercer", Bean would make and record prank calls, including calling businesses and individuals to threaten them with an "ass-whuppin'" if they didn't pay him money as recompense for some fictional incident. Like The Jerky Boys' early work, his tapes were shared hand-to-hand rather than sold commercially.
  • Several years later in the 1990s, disc jockeys Brent Douglas and Phil Stone on radio station KMOD-FM in Tulsa, Oklahoma created a character (voiced by Douglas) whom they called "Roy D. Mercer", originally as part of their morning show. This Mercer also made prank phone calls in which he demanded payment for a fictional offense against him and promised an "ass-whuppin'" to anyone who refused to pay up. Collections of Roy D. Mercer calls were eventually distributed on CD. Despite the similarity of character names and material, Douglas and Stone denied that they had copied "Leroy Mercer".
  • Russell Brand sometimes does this in his stand-up set, usually finding a slightly silly advertisement in the local newspaper of the town where he's doing the show and calling the business up with outrageous requests.
    • He also did this on his radio show, which led to the infamous Sachsgate Scandal, in which (long story short) a message on comedian Andrew Sach's answering machine caused outrage due to comments about his granddaughter, leading to The BBC getting fined by the regulators, Jonathon Ross (who was also present) being suspended and Brand's eventual resignation from the BBC. Proof that this kind of joke isn't always appreciated.

Video Games

  • Maniac Mansion has the option for the player to pull a prank call to distract villainess Nurse Edna when she enters her room.

Web Original

  • Beginning in early 2011, 4chan organized a prank calling of the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, home to the popular television show Pawn Stars. The callers would repeatedly ask the employees if they sold Battletoads, a video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System notorious for its difficulty. This call led Rick Harrison, owner of the store, to repeatedly swear and yell at the prank callers, who recorded this and uploaded it to YouTube. This originated several other similar videos of pranksters dialing random establishments and asking about Battletoads.
  • The Annoying Orange‍'‍s episode "Prank Call #1: Tanning Salon" is a real prank call.
  • During his review of Cry Wolf, Phelous makes a prank call to the police. This leads to a cop shooting a fellow skit artist at the end of the review and then arresting Phelous.
  • Snopes relays the tale of a woman who called into a radio show on Valentine's Day to have the DJ's prank call her boyfriend. The DJ called the man and offered him free flowers, and he chose to send them... to his wife. Oops. (They classify the story as a "legend".)
  • Minneapolis radio personality T.D. Mischke hosted a podcast when he was between jobs. The phone number his sponsors gave him turned out to have been previously owned by a few different people with credit problems. When the collection agencies would call in, he would have a lot of fun with them. Here's a sample!

Western Animation

  • A common Running Gag throughout The Simpsons deals with Bart prank calling Moe with random names, resulting in Moe's rants towards the caller. Yet, fan theories suggest that although Moe knows Bart was behind the pranks, as he's used to his voice, he still goes along due to loneliness.
    • In "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Krusty's TV replacement, Gabbo, gets ready to perform a "patented Gabbo Crank Call" (on Krusty himself). When Bart complains that "he stole that bit from Krusty", Lisa counters that Krusty stole it from Steve Allen.
    • In one episode, Bart pulls the "refrigerator running" joke on Principal Skinner; this causes Skinner to discover his refrigerator is not running, and thanks Bart for letting him know.
    • Subverted in another episode in which one of Bart's calls to Moe's backfires when there actually is someone with the made-up name in the bar. When he accepts the call a stunned Bart meekly explains the prank gone wrong and apologizes. After he hangs up, the bar patron describes him as a "polite young man".
  • Regular Show had an episode, simply called "Prank Callers", revolving around this and featuring "The Master Prank Caller".
  • It probably comes as no surprise that Beavis and Butt-Head had a prank call episode, called (of course) "Prank Call".
  • In Futurama, a prank call directed Fry to deliver a pizza to Seymour Asses, a false address. When he discovered this, he decided to eat the pizza himself, and shared it with a stray dog who then became his devoted pet and vainly waited for his "return" from cryosuspension until its death in 2012.
  • In an episode of Dinosaucers, the Big Bad, Genghis Rex, decides to grab a phone guide and prank call people because he is bored.
  • In the courtroom episode of Clerks: The Animated Series, the prosecuting attorney plays tapes of a prank call made by Jay and Randal (completely unrelated to the case) as part of the trial.
  • In one episode of The Powerpuff Girls, the Gang Green Gang used the Mayor's emergency phone to prank call the Powerpuff Girls into beating up villains who weren't doing anything.
  • In the episode "Up All Night" of The Angry Beavers, Daggett tries to make a prank call. Not only does he botch the delivery, he accidentally calls his mom.

Real Life

  • Two early and famous prank phone calls are the "refrigerator" gag and the "Prince Albert" (a brand of tobacco) gag. The first involves calling a target to ask "is your refrigerator running?" When the responder says "yes," the prankster replies "Well, you'd better go catch it!" The second requires calling a commercial establishment to ask if they have "Prince Albert in a can." If the reply is yes, the prankster responds with "Then you'd better let the poor guy out!" The origin of both of these jokes is unknown, although it is theorized they may have been adapted from vaudeville routines rather than any single real-life incident. They have since been repeated in multiple outlets, though less for their comedic value than to convey the idea of a "prank phone call."
  • One of the primary inspirations for Bart's prank calls in The Simpsons is the real life Tube Bar prank calls from the mid-1970s. A pair of pranksters who called themselves the "Bum Bar Bastards" recorded numerous calls they made to the now-gone Tube Bar in Jersey City, NJ, owned and operated by former heavyweight boxer Louis "Red" Deutsch. In these, they would (like Bart) lead him to call out offensively punny names for non-existent patrons allegedly wanted on the phone. In the 1980s numerous (incomplete) collections of the calls were circulated on cassette tape and were even commercially released until the Bum Bar Bastards stepped forward, claimed the copyright, and released their own definitive collection. (The most recent release of which, as of this writing, was on CD in 2015.) Matt Groening has described himself as a fan of the Tube Bar tapes, and although he denies any direct connection between them and Bart's prank calls, Bart has over the years used more than a few of the same gags the BBB inflicted on Red Deutsch.
  • Apparently the fear of this has become so ubiquitous that a US senator hung up on US President-Elect Barack Obama because she thought he was a prankster. The fact that VP candidate Sarah Palin fell victim to a just such a prank several weeks earlier (this one from a group pretending to be the French president and his aide) probably contributed. President Obama was said to have been amused.
  • Steve Wozniak once owned a telephone number that was a frequent misdial for an airline. He would test his callers to see what kind of imaginary flights he could book, lowering the price by adding a ridiculous number of connections, and so forth. But these calls were never recorded or published.


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